iwoca launches free AI PR tool to close SME visibility gap

Fintech lender iwoca's toro targets 5.4 million under-resourced UK small businesses losing ground in AI-driven search.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Sun, 1 November 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

A brightly lit, modern control room features a large curved video wall displaying complex, swirling data visualizations, with two multi-monitor control desks in the foreground.

iwoca, one of Europe's largest SME lenders, has launched toro, a free AI-powered PR tool designed to help small businesses with no press office generate media coverage and improve their visibility in AI-powered search results. The product is available without an account or subscription and sits alongside iwoca's existing suite of SME tools, which includes its payments product iwocaPay, a business credit card, and manda, an M&A marketplace launched the previous week.

The timing is deliberate. Research cited by iwoca, drawn from Muck Rack's Generative Pulse report, found that 84% of the sources cited by AI tools are earned media: journalism, encyclopaedic references, and third-party coverage, rather than paid placements or brand-owned content. A separate Ahrefs analysis of 75,000 brands found that those with the highest volume of web mentions appear up to ten times more often in top AI-generated answers. For the UK's 5.4 million businesses with fewer than ten employees, that dynamic is structurally hostile: they have the least existing coverage, the fewest resources to generate new content, and the smallest budgets to compete for attention.

The shrinking media infrastructure problem

The challenge is compounded by the hollowing-out of regional media. Press Gazette data cited in the release shows that the nine regional publishers now consolidated into Reach, Newsquest and National World employed around 9,000 journalists in 2007; by 2022 that figure had fallen to roughly 3,000, with at least 293 local titles closed since 2005. Research from the Public Interest News Foundation found 37 UK local authority districts now qualify as news deserts, 27 of them without any local news outlet at all. The infrastructure that historically gave small businesses their first press clip has contracted sharply, precisely as AI search systems have raised the stakes for having one.

toro attempts to bridge that gap by analysing a business's updates and producing press release drafts, social posts, and journalist pitch templates. Importantly, the platform stops short of automated mass distribution. Mark Di-Toro, iwoca's Director of Strategic Communications and the product's architect, says the decision was intentional: "Users must edit the materials, add the detail only they know, and then reach out to suggested journalists personally or through their teams. No blanket send-outs, no untargeted pitching. A personal approach combined with a timely story is what cuts through."

The fintech-to-media-infrastructure convergence angle

The launch matters beyond the product itself. iwoca's move signals a broader strategic shift in which fintech platforms are expanding their addressable market by providing infrastructure services, PR, payments, credit, M&A advisory, that were previously siloed across separate professional service providers. For the SME segment, this bundling dynamic mirrors what Stripe Atlas did for company formation or what Shopify did for retail infrastructure: aggregating previously fragmented operational capability into a single, low-friction interface.

For media and publishing, toro's framing carries an uncomfortable implication. If AI search is structurally amplifying businesses with the richest existing editorial footprints, then the concentration of media coverage among larger, better-resourced organisations is not merely a commercial unfairness, it is a feedback loop that increasingly shapes which businesses surface in AI-assisted discovery, procurement, and investment contexts. A fintech lender stepping into the gap left by shrinking regional journalism is an unusual convergence, and one that raises questions about who ultimately owns the SME communications stack.

Whether toro achieves meaningful scale will depend on adoption and editorial quality at the point of human editing, but the underlying market logic is sound. The attention economy's shift toward AI-curated results has created a structural disadvantage for smaller players, and the first credible aggregator to solve visibility for that segment stands to deepen its relationship with 5.4 million businesses across the UK alone.